From the second of those threads:
I fundamentally disagree with the premise of the first sentence which takes as a given that we should view reducing deaths from Covid, an endemic virus with a low death rate, as more important than continuing to live in what most of us would regard as a free society.
The rest essentially boils down to a self congratulatory spiel which can be summed up as : “we didn’t need more restrictions, because we manipulated the population into doing what we wanted them to anyway”:
My personal view of the U.K. government’s approach is that a much lighter-touch approach should have been taken, with far fewer (if ahard legal restrictions, and more emphasis on individual choice and responsibility, even if that led to more deaths directly attributed to Covid.
By all means encourage the vulnerable to isolate, encourage social distancing, but measures such as forcing businesses to close and placing legal restrictions on the ability of individuals to associate to a greater extent than was seen even during WW2 was quite simply a massive overreaction, and one which was mostly borne out of cowardice and political weakness.
Rather than terrifying the population into submission with alarmist nonsense around “staying safe”, and imposing measures such as masks purely for theatre, I would have preferred the government to get on board with instilling stoicism, a “blitz spirit”, and being more honest about the reality that, whatever we do, this pandemic is sadly going to lead to many deaths, but that we will get through it, and we *cannot* abandon our democratic values and way of life.
That said we are where we are, and I admire the Danish approach of stating that the virus is no longer a “societal threat”. This is the kind of messaging the U.K. government could do well to adopt, rather than yet more mixed messages and weasel words from Boris who we all know is as clueless as any of us is about what direction he and his government will be taking over the next few weeks and months.